Dorothy M. York accepts plea deal in connection to a 2002 fatal shooting in Fairfield

After spending a year behind bars pending a jury trial, a Sacramento woman accepted a plea deal this week in connection with the 2002 gunshot slaying of an Oakland man in Fairfield.

The deal, reached on Tuesday in Solano County Superior Court, puts to rest a decade-old case that Solano County prosecutors have sought to prove twice. In the end, Dorothy M. York, 34, agreed to a 10-year state prison sentence in exchange for her no-contest plea to voluntary manslaughter for the death of 67-year-old George F. Dawkins.

Dawkins was gunned down at his Rancho Solano home in Fairfield on the night of Sept. 28, 2002. It was a weekend getaway location for Dawkins, who routinely used it to entertain female companions.

That night, Dawkins had been enjoying the company of York and another woman, Corina Brennan. It was intended to be a weekend of partying.

However, as Brennan would testify during a January 2003 preliminary hearing, York armed herself with a small handgun and allegedly fired it several times at Dawkins who, severely wounded, crawled onto a sofa. Brennan said she and York then fled the home in Dawkins' car, making no attempt to summon help for their mortally wounded host.

In June 2003, prosecutors would have to drop the murder charge against York after her defense attorney successfully filed a motion to suppress statements made by York to Fairfield police after her arrest.

In November 2011, prosecutors were able to get a Solano County Superior Court criminal grand jury to issue a murder indictment against York.

The transcript from those hearings consisted of roughly 400 pages of testimony from more than a dozen witnesses who recounted York's actions the night she and Brennan partied with Dawkins, as well as her bizarre and threatening behavior in the months after being released from Solano County Jail in 2003.

York's sister, Tasha Murphy, testified to a jailhouse visit with York in which she admitted to shooting Dawkins twice.

"She made it seem like an altercation and that she was trying to -- she was trying to get away and that he wouldn't let her and that she had a phone, the house phone, and she was trying to call the police because something had happened and he wouldn't let her. They started having an altercation and then she shot him," Murphy testified.

As part of the plea agreement, York admitted to the special allegation that she personally used a firearm causing death. The offense counts as a strike under the state's three-strikes law and York will be required to serve a minimum of 85 percent of the sentence.

Sentencing is set for 9 a.m. on Dec. 11 in the Fairfield courtroom of Judge Wendy G. Getty.